The melancholy, the philosophic irony, the elaborate music of a play by John Synge, the simplicity, the sense of splendour of living in Lady Gregory’s lamentation of Emer, Mr. James Stephens when he makes the sea waves ‘Tramp with banners on the shore’ are as much typical of our thoughts and day, as was ’She dwelt beside the Anner with mild eyes like the dawn,’ or any stanza of the ‘Pretty girl of Lough Dan,’ or any novel of Charles Lever’s of a time that sought to bring Irish men and women into one nation by means of simple patriotism and a genial taste for oratory and anecdotes.  A like change passed over Ferrara’s brick and stone when its great Duke, where there had been but narrow medieval streets, made many palaces and threw out one straight and wide street, as Carducci said, to meet the Muses.  Doubtless the men of ‘Perdondaris that famous city’ have such antiquity of manners and of culture that it is of small moment should they please themselves with some tavern humour; but we must needs cling to ‘our foolish Irish pride’ and form an etiquette, if we would not have our people crunch their chicken bones with too convenient teeth, and make our intellect architectural that we may not see them turn domestic and effusive nor nag at one another in narrow streets.

III

Some of the writers of our school have intended, so far as any creative art can have deliberate intention, to make this change, a change having more meaning and implications than a few sentences can define.  When I was first moved by Lord Dunsany’s work I thought that he would more help this change if he could bring his imagination into the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air; but even as I urged him I knew that he could not, without losing his rich beauty of careless suggestion, and the persons and images that for ancestry have all those romantic ideas that are somewhere in the background of all our minds.  He could not have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, premeditated, and scientific.

When we approach subtle elaborate emotions we can but give our minds up to play or become as superstitious as an old woman, for we cannot hope to understand.  It is one of my superstitions that we became entangled in a dream some twenty years ago; but I do not know whether this dream was born in Ireland from the beliefs of the country men and women, or whether we but gave ourselves up to a foreign habit as our spirited Georgian fathers did to gambling, sometimes lying, as their history has it, on the roadside naked, but for the heap of straw they had pulled over them, till they could wager a lock of hair or the paring of a nail against what might set them up in clothes again.